Heat Lightning

you’ll have him by noon tomorrow,” Davenport said. “The big question is, are there more targets? It’d be sort of a Bad Thing if another body turned up.”
    “Thank you, boss.”
    Mc DONALD, AN AGENT in the BCA’s northern Minnesota office, was in the middle of dinner, which he mentioned in passing, and which Virgil ignored. He explained what he needed, and McDonald said, “I can do that—but my guy up there, the computer guy, won’t be in until tomorrow morning.”
    “Anything we can get,” Virgil said. “People are starting to grit their teeth down here.”
    Another phone call from Carol. “The Sinclair guy just called, and he’s pissed.”
    “Did he say what about?”
    “He said something about some Vietnamese . . .”
    “I’ll call him.”
    He did.
    Sinclair said, “Why did you tell Phem and Tai that I gave you their names? They think you’re investigating them. I could be out of a job. How in the hell did you even know about them?”
    “Asked around,” Virgil said. “You mentioned working for Larson on the hotels that they want to build in Vietnam, and I thought, well, maybe there’d be some Vietnamese I could talk to. Turns out they’re Canadian.”
    “Goddamnit, Flowers, it’s gonna take forever to paper this over.”
    “I could give them a call,” Virgil said.
    “But you lied to them,” Sinclair said. “What could you tell them this time?”
    “That I misspoke?”
    Sinclair said, “Ah, man.” Then, “Listen, you want to talk to them again, don’t bring my name into it, okay? I mean, you’re really messing me up here.”
     
VIRGIL APOLOGIZED one last time as he rolled into the motel parking lot. He had one foot out of the truck when Sandy, the researcher, called.
    “I had to tell some lies,” she said.
    Cops all lie, Virgil thought. But he said, “Let’s meet at the cathedral. I’ll sprinkle some holy water on your ass.”
    “Sounds like a deal,” she said, with a slender note of invitation in her voice. She paused, looking for a reaction.
    “Sandy!” He was shocked. Sandy was the office virgin, though, he’d noticed, from a move he’d seen with another guy in a hallway, actual virginity was unlikely.
    “Chicken,” she said. “All right, what I got is this. If Ray Bunton got an unexpected tax refund, and it was sent to an old girlfriend, and the girlfriend called his cousin up in Red Lake and asked where she could send the check, she’d get a phone number to call. The phone number is attached to an address in south Minneapolis, off Franklin.”
    “Atta girl.”
    “That’s what I need. More atta girls.” And she was gone.
    Ray Bunton: Virgil looked up at the motel, sighed, and got back in the truck.

8
    BUNTON WAS living in a ramshackle place off Franklin Avenue south of the Minneapolis loop, a house that hadn’t been painted in fifty years, a worn-out lawn that had been driven on repeatedly, dandelions glowing from patches of oily grass.
    Virgil left the truck a few doors down so he could look at the house for a moment as he walked along; and after he stepped into the street, he thought about it for a moment, reached under the seat, got his pistol in the leather inside-the-belt holster, and stuck it in the small of his back, under his jacket.
    As he headed down the street, he could hear somebody playing an old Black Sabbath piece, “Paranoid,” pounding out of a stereo or boom box. From the end of a cracked two-strip driveway that squeezed between the close-set houses, he could see a garage in back of Bunton’s place. A guy was lying under a rusted-out Blazer, which was up on steel ramps. A couple of work lights lay on the floor, shining on the underside of the car. A motorcycle, slung like a Harley softtail, sat on the drive in front of the garage.
    Virgil watched for a few seconds, then wandered up the driveway. As he came up to the back of the house, the man pushed out from under the truck and wiped his hands on a rag. Virgil recognized him as Bunton. He walked up to the lip of the garage, hands in his jeans pockets, and stood there for a moment, until Bunton felt him and turned his face up, and Virgil said, “Hey.”
    Bunton held up a finger, crawled across the floor to the boom box, and poked a button on it; the silence seemed to jump out of the ground.
    Bunton asked, “You a cop?”
    “Yeah. BCA. Trying to figure out what happened to Bob Sanderson,” Virgil said.
    Bunton dropped his chin to his chest, then shook his head, crawled a few